Pages

Saturday, April 21, 2012

A voice we don't usually hear

In the last several months, I have come across several blog, articles and videos about "third party reproduction." Some of the most striking come from children of sperm donors. It's a voice we don't usually hear as we debate the merits or consequences of artificially creating life. But it's a voice we need to hear. As Jennifer Roback Morse often says when discussing same-sex adoption, we need to focus on giving children the parents they need, not on giving parents the children they want.

So, here's a moment of reflection from someone whose coming to be involved a petri dish and a biological father who is unknown:

But this question does reveal something else to me - I do feel and always, it seems to me, have felt, an ambivalence towards my very existence. I have felt worthless and depressed and unworthy of love and life and at times suicidal. A failure. Never good enough. Incapable of pleasing.

I am now convinced this has something to do with my parents' ambivalence towards my existence.

I was proof of my father's fertility in public, a source of his shame in secret.

I was my mother's dream come true, and a source of her guilt in front of her husband for getting her genetic child when he didn't get his, which is why she probably allowed him to appropriate me and sabotage my relationship with her from the very start, when he persuaded her she couldn't nurse me, although she wanted to.

"Although I have lived through much darkness, under harsh totalitarian regimes, I have seen enough evidence to be unshakably convinced that no difficulty, no fear is so great that it can completely suffocate the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young. You are our hope, the young are our hope. [...] Do not let that hope die! Stake your lives on it! We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son." -- Pope John Paul II, World Youth Day 2002